


trouble needs a place to sleep

by mimiofthemalfoys



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/F, Grishaverse Big Bang 2019, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Past Abortion, Post-Book 3: Ruin and Rising, Sexual Content, yes and what about it, yes they have sex in a church
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:55:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21936340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimiofthemalfoys/pseuds/mimiofthemalfoys
Summary: when night does fall, it all looks the same. her hair and zoya's eyes and the silver-gold swirls on their abandoned keftas, everything, everything dances in pure, unblemished starlight.that first winter after she dies, swamped by shadows twice over, alina starkov is brought to life again.
Relationships: Zoya Nazyalensky/Alina Starkov
Comments: 15
Kudos: 56
Collections: Grishaverse Big Bang 2019





	trouble needs a place to sleep

**Author's Note:**

> written for the grishaverse big bang 2019. title inspired from ghost in the machine by The Fire and The Sea. it's a song about the most bewildering kind of love and that's what this story is about.

For the first winter or so, she tries her best. Battles the blight with thick lumps of charcoal, hammers in new floorboards, saws through split wood ends with rolls of sandpaper, the kind they’d used on irritable teething toddlers back at the orphanage, right until she’s chipped her nails down to the cuticles, and – _may the Saints bless and keep her_ \- heads down to the fortnightly village fair in a spur-of-the-moment onslaught of poor life choices; allowing herself to be jostled and groped for two whole hours standing on an overcrowded morning ferry across lower Sokol... and all this for a goddamned toolset, bleeding forty silver coins off her nest’s egg. She even goes the extra mile, buys Zemeni poppies in pretty painted pots for the corners where mould has covered wooden panels like a fetid second skin and inserts solid pelts of dried orange blossom in strategic parts of the house.

In the end, like always, it is the rot that bests Alina Starkov. There’s too much decay, too much ruination for even her prodigious fingers to coax back into the deep earth.

She gives up. Waits, as penitents do, for the beginning of the end.

* * *

One soot-grey spring morning, they wake to rain. The air heaves, soft and soggy, stale-bread mouthfuls of it clogging their lungs. Before the first, unprofessionally early cups of sweet black tea have relieved most of what Zoya jokingly terms _dawntime debility_ , some kind of accelerated downpour threatens to shatter every window to smithereens, and flood the fireplaces with strange debris and unidentified floating objects from the rooftops of Keramzin. To make matters worse, there's a leakage from the kitchen ceiling that's resulted in a Kerch-shaped puddle to coagulate like piss on the floor, and it's getting bigger by the minute. Or so it seems.

“Gorgeous day,” is the first phrase that greets Alina when she walks into the pantry. “Makes me feel in my element.”

“ _Good morning, darling Alina_. Also, you’re sitting on the bone china.”

“Good morning, darling Alina. Wouldn’t you give me a morning kiss?”

“Depends. Have you washed?”

To that, Zoya guffaws and shifts her hips a mere inch. “Do you think they’re taking sand skiffs through Kribirsk again? Nikolai had told me they might be sending delegates to look into damage assessment projects in the upper Obol.”

“If they are, they are overdoing it. I don’t remember the last time Grisha power fuelled thunderstorms in the Obol-Sokol basin.”

“Well. You know what-” _Oh, saints, not that again_. This is just another of those days when everything from the weather to the breakfast to the chickens clucking in their backyard makes Zoya morph into a sentient, ungreased, badly tuned balalaika and she starts her maudlin rhapsodies about What It Was like to Have Once Been a Powerful Soldier of the Second Army and frankly, once the monologues begin it’s beyond the power of any being ( _saint, summoner, strawberry farmer, all of them_ ) to shut her trap.

 _You didn’t even have to pretend to die and get fucked in every implication of that word by the man you’d supposedly loved. Worse, you didn’t have to rinse your cursed mane in malachite paste._ “Zoya, shut up please, and drink your tea.”

“I’m just saying, if I was there, if I was still leading that godforsaken regiment-”

“You aren’t though, are you? You are not leading the Triumvirate, I’m not Sankta of any goddamned thing, and it’s best we stop mooning and cooing over could-have-beens.”

Not used to being ticked off by a dead saint, Zoya does indeed shut up, though not without sticking out her tongue at her chastiser. “It’s a bad storm is all I’m _sayiing_ ,” she drawls, stretching out the syllables of the last word till it sounds ridiculous on her bawdy ungodly tongue.

Alina, measuring out the sugar for her preserves, doesn’t respond immediately, because she knows the raven-haired Squaller has made up her mind to be a bitch about it ( _as she always is. as she always does_.) and mentally add it to the endless litany of things she has to suffer because she was stupid enough to move out to the dormant countryside. It is, in some ways, more difficult for Zoya than it is for herself; she knows this implicitly and derives a certain perverse pleasure from the same insight. She has always lived within her means, with not a coin spent on anything that could be said to be extraneous, has always embraced the quietness and dullness of predictability. It comes naturally, resulting from her less-than-spectacular upbringing, her past history of resembling a poorly-stitched bag of bones with ratty hair and jutting elbows. Hell, she is living what Nikolai would mockingly call the life of the ideal Saint; she makes her own clothes, grows most of her own food in the land she’s obtained, has never owned a carriage or a pony (Being groped on the ferry is bad, but spending tons of money on stablekeeping and servants is worse)... just personal projects on sustainable existence. Ana Kuya has taught her, and taught her well, Alina supposes, in the art of giving much more than she takes.

But Zoya, Zoya of the stormy seas and grand dreams and elaborate Shu cosmetic kits, Zoya who dreams of being a queen someday ( ~~and no doubt banishing all unfashionable folk to Fjerda~~ ), Zoya cannot relate to all this salt-of-the-earth nonsense. The journey from silk keftas and choice Ravkan delicacies served to her on silver plates in a luxurious Little Palace bedroom to crusty, tasteless bread that might have been sitting round for three nights....not as rosy gold. She complains, because she can. She wears soft sheer silks under threadbare shirts and wanders about the house with nothing to do, no one to talk to, an absolutely incongruent display of swell and curve and grouchy thorny loveliness. Tamar says Zoya confided in her once of having suffered from nightmares where she was forced to marry a goatherd.

Still, Alina exults. Because she _can,_ too.

* * *

Louder, faster, wilder. It's one of those storms which makes her side-eye Zoya, inwardly brewing a ludicrous fantasy of emerging unscathed from this mess- that is, if only the clusterfuck with swearwords tattooed on individual braincells could actually be convinced to move her bottom from the kitchen counter, where she's now sinuously draped against Alina's favourite tea-set - the blue one, with the enamelled finches, courtesy Nadia. Odd setting, Alina will later find herself wondering- this scandalous demonstration of impropriety against imported crockery ~~and in the home of a Saint too. Now back in my days~~.

(Of course, such thoughts, freshly risen Zoya, half-mussed by sleep, the imprint of cotton quilted flowers on her cheeks, flimsy nightrobe falling off one shoulder _just so_.... such thoughts are always _un_ conscious and _un_ welcome when they spill out. Alina wonders why she notices the silliest things, why mundanity maddens her so severely that to pass the hour-long seconds she has kept inventory of every faint scar tissue weaving pale swirls and eddies across Zoya’s smooth, shining arms. She has better things to do, for fuck’s sake. Like picking at scabs till they bleed. Or scraping thin films of hoarfrost off the newest batch of apples in her generously tended plot.)

But after an hour or so, the view from the tiny kitchen window shows nothing except sweeping, shivering sheets of rain on murky glass. She assumes there’ll be little left to salvage of the greens tomorrow. A good Sun Summoner makes for a poor country cultivator and she is neither.

“I’ll head down to the farm,” she announces eventually. “Kuzma and I might have to check if the weirs have broken.”

“Oh, Starkov, don’t be a fool. You’ll drown before you can set foot in the fields. Kuzma won’t be up and out before midday.”

“We’ve been sitting around for six hours at the least.”

“Too bad, then the water should already be waist-deep. Must be wonderful to wade around. Want to spend another dawn to dusk in the bogs, Sankta?”

“Why not,” Alina replies, impassive, though she’s already turning it over in her head, the prospect seeming bleaker and bleaker the more she gives it thought. Kuzma, the man who helps her with the farm, shall probably refuse to leave the warm, dry confines of his hut, which would only mean more hours alone in the grime, pulling out weeds and thinking about how the woman Ravka celebrates in painted icons and delicate stain-glasses cannot keep slugs away from lettuce patches. _Nothing like killing a good old slug on a rainy morning,_ she ruminates grimly, before realising she is doing it again, paying too much heed to the devil in her head, the devil that manifests itself as a six-foot entity sitting at her breakfast table and hating her clothes and sharing her _kvas_. “I could have a late lunch at his place. Of course, that would mean, for a change, that you’d have to make your own fucking food.”

Zoya feigns deafness. “The roof’s leaking,” she notes, in an exaggerated display of wonder, like it’s some second coming of the Blessed, some miracle of Sankta Lizabeta, like the roof hasn’t been leaking for all of seven months.

“Check the reservoir. I’m going to go see if the water has receded.”

“I don’t take orders from a country bumpkin and I don’t need your supervision.”

“Ah, alright, but you need my bread to eat, my roof to live under and my money to splurge, no?”

One loud obscenity and a few disconsolate grumbles later, Zoya finally stretches her perfect limbs, and with a sweep of her perfect hair, struts perfectly and gracelessly out of the pantry. Alina watches her leave, feeling drained, as she always does after verbally sparring with the other girl, and heads out to the porch, shutting the rickety door behind her.

* * *

She is greeted by spray, salt and storm.

A grey world, a melting world of rain and glass _._ The gardens, which she had so laboriously tended, are drowned in about chest-deep runoff; Alina can barely see the woodpile they’d drove into the earth during winter to mark the depth of snow. Ahead of her, the horizons of Keramzin blur into a swollen, untamed wasteland. Cashew farms spread out over five acres of legally-bound terrain yield enough produce to support a small section of share-croppers who have continued living on the land for three generations after the Duke died. The property lies shrouded in mist, as do the sedge-thatched chicken coops to the left of her garden. Behind that, behind the farms and the groves of densely-nestled hazels, invisible now in the deluge, lies a meadow.

_Soft. Green. Bound by a lake on one end, and the Duke’s riding grounds on the other. Round-cheeked memories, hazy at the edges. Gorse-beds, where she’d scratched her knees raw, mud-fighting with Mal. An ash tree, where he’d etched their names in clumsy childish script with a pen-knife they’d nicked from Ana Kuya’s study._

Who were they?

 _Malyen Oretsev. Alina Starkov._ _Two terrible ghosts with the border at their heels and driftwood for family._

What happened to them?

_They died on the Fold. Ravka didn’t watch them fall._

Not the tears.

Not after breakfast.

 _You’re always so goddamn indecisive_.

Yet it passes. It always does.

_Sankta Alina, martyred on the Fold, weeping for a tree ravaged with a pen-knife._

She sighs, leans against the doorframe, suddenly aware of her small stature, of her weak unsaintly unpolished self. Leached of colour, like Keramzin in the storm. Suddenly aware of the world coming apart in a way that’s unsettling- too fast, too soon, dirty old mosaic pieces of it crumbling in a quasi-domino effect. _The Ravka syndrome_ , Nikolai had called it. _It’s the country beating us down._

But the roof’s leaking. Ravka can wait.

* * *

When it had first been made, the panels of the house had been inlaid with embellished oyster shells. In some rooms, the shells still glitter and glint on catching slivers of sun, but they are too few, the rest having disintegrated into small heaps of iridescent dust that powder the bottoms of the walls, leaving them naked and ugly. A wooden shrine holds framed icons to Sankt Grigori and Sankta Anastasia. Discarded articles of clothing everywhere: on chairs, on the ground, draped against the flowerpots- to be scrubbed and wrung and turned inside out to check for frays and loose threads, before Alina tosses them back into the wardrobe. An elegant embroidered wrap. A crumpled apron, roses stitched down its length. Diaphanous cotton shirts. Scuffed sandals, twin pairs, deep blue and bright yellow.

Inside a cedar chest in the master bedroom, crisp silk keftas await the day of judgement. Cobalt with shots of silver brocade. Gold with jewelled sunbursts.

That first dreadful winter, a young girl never went home to her parents. She died on a pyre in the ruins of the Shadow Fold with a different name and face, pallid and painted to embrace the heavy burden of passive sainthood. In most artistic re-creations, she was prettier than Alina had ever been: rosy-faced, with graceful brows and deep dimples. Her eyes were wide open, and brightest amber. She looked like she could wash away ruin with her brilliant arsenal of light. She looked like a true saint.

Her legacy: the church by the drydocks, with its dome painted in gold. A hundred white lilies. Seven days of mourning. A man and his wife who waited patiently for their daughter and named a new saint in their nightly prayers so her light might lead their only child home.

 _Sankta Alina_ , they sang. _May_ _Sankta Alina_ _keep her safe_.

* * *

In those initial days and weeks following the move, she had studied her new home like a lover’s body. Every inch of it was seething with secrets, waiting to be smoothed out from the creaking woodwork and tall mullioned windows- detritus of cheap, mock Lantsov house-building. Sometimes she was her own personal ghost, drifting through the entire length of the place, from the furthest corner of the attic to the darkest point in the cellar, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, until a terrifying wave of dread threatened to swallow her alive and spit her back into the very core of the country that had martyred her, mottled and bloodless.

These thoughts had frightened her more than they should have. She had talked to Tamar about it, and it came to her that talking somehow shredded off whatever linings of sense she’d woven into her thoughts and made her sound like a complete madwoman.

 _It’s that house_ , she’d say. _That house is driving me mad._ ( _Cue practised laugh, cue self-deprecatory nod._ )

To that, the Heartrender had folded her arms, in the classic Kir-Bataar argumentative stance, and had asked her to re-evaluate.

 _Is it really the house, sister?_ Tamar had asked, lamplight glinting off the gold in her irises. _Or is it the war that followed you home?_

Which _was_ it?

In an uncharacteristic moment of speechlessness, Alina hadn’t had a clever reply. She’d shrugged it off then, put it down to the strain of her new life and yet all the while had secretly hated Tamar, unjustly, unfairly, for her sympathetic stare, hated herself too, for having been so easy to pry open, to have overshared the glib embarrassing details of her life, for having become easy fodder of pity talk.

By the time the official roster for the Tsibeya light infantry was out that winter, she’d already brought in the remainder of her things. They’d meant for the house to serve as some safe haven mumbo-jumbo for the Grisha, the result of a sugar-rush induced pact made on one of her last nights at Tomikyana with her friends, but the thing about promises made by children of war, Alina had learnt, was just that: they were fickle things, fancies of those who grasped at straws for soft-hued dreams of the future. They were with her, Mal and her Grisha friends, when she stepped inside her new home for the first time. They held her hand and gave her gifts and smoothed her hair and wiped her tears (of course there were tears) and Genya had promised her she wouldn’t become a memory anytime soon, that she was still Alina, only Alina, their friend, not _Sankta Alina_ or _Sol Koroleva_ or any of those godforsaken titles Ravka had stuffed down her throat, making her gag on her own name, on the burnt tang of her own benefaction.

And yet.

And _yet_.

It was in fact Genya who was the first of her friends to stop the countryside expeditions. She wasn’t Tailor Genya anymore; she was Triumvirate member and Corporalki leader Genya Safin with an order to handle and a palace to run. Her visits grew brief and sporadic- she was often called away mid-conversation to look into some pressing concern at the court, a guest who’d breached royal protocol, some soldiers who needed work done for covert missions at Halmhend. She tried to balance things out, often sending gifts and messages via David, until even these stopped, until Ravka sought her urgency, until Alina herself had to gently bid her prioritize the country over extraneous obligations.

So Genya left first, and then Nikolai ( _King_ Nikolai now), for whom the task of getting tailored monthly and being whisked away to the countryside slowly morphed into an inconvenience and also somewhat of a hazard- how many sudden visits could a king afford to a far-flung southern village without the more questionable members of his court suspecting foul play? And once Nikolai discontinued his visits, the other Grisha subconsciously emulated their king. _They sure were a faithful lot_ , Alina would give them that.

The money she earned- from selling the yield of her harvest to a farmer’s market on the east banks of the Sokol- was just enough to live by, but once in every two months she received an additional pension from the Grand Palace in sleek blue envelopes, envelopes that she reused, ripping out the fancy Os Alta stamps and sealing the openings with hot wax, when she sent in the rent to her landlord, an old wine-merchant with land up in Petrazoi. Once in every fortnight, she travelled down to the farmer’s market for bread and dairy and meat and vegetables, lugging in her supplies in overfilled brown hemp sacks. Sometimes she’d give in to some tiny extravagance: yellow tulips in a reed-thin glass holder, a box of strawberries she’d permitted herself to purchase one sunny winter afternoon. She had prepared to grow old, to die in Keramzin with her flowers and her strawberries. Truth be told, it didn’t seem like such a bad way to go.

At her worst, she was ambushed by sudden vicious manifestations of self-hatred: hot angry tears, gnashing teeth until she drew blood, shirking in fear of the insidious ghosts in every inch of every room, reminding her she was dead to the world. Hours of passing into nothingness, and staring emptily at the light through the cracks on the walls, at large stone parapets, covered with decaying hyacinths snaking into the property, absurd monuments celebrating mundanity.

On some days, Alina had felt like a stranger, ill at ease in her own house. It was as if the living space had morphed into a sentient being, and saints, it _hated_ her. The more she explored, the more it had closed itself off: locked grates, sliding doors opening into solid walls, boxes in the loft that had seemed promising but opened to release silverfish before collapsing in powdery clouds of yellow lace. Cruel tricks, to make her feel small, foolish, playing pretend along the lines of some overzealous farmer’s campfire story after one too many glasses of _kvas_.

However, on other days, the house was like an eager lover, disrobing itself, revealing its scanty secrets willingly if she cared to look. Like the wilderness of roses that had grown out from fissures in the attic, carpeting dirt with a bed of blooms. Like the way the kitchen walls glowed pink in the dawns when first light hit the glass. Like the summer feeling that nestled within her veins when she fell asleep some nights- making her stare wide-eyed into the cold, empty side of a too-big bed, and pray for someone, anyone, to walk in through the front door, plague the life out of her and breathe the semblance of some emotion back into her body again.

Then, that solstice, a letter arrived at the village post, emblazoned with the royal coat of arms, the Lanstov eagle, and the Etherealki sigil at the corner. Written in a loopy, elegant script on expensive stationery, the style at odds with the sentiment:

_They won’t have me here. You said I could bring her to safety, but clearly Ravka thinks rather differently of the black-haired Suli whore who soiled herself in Morozova’s bed. I’m sick of whispers, I’m sick of fighting, and the young king is sick of me. Clearly this is your chance to gloat, and it gives me no great pleasure to write this but I’ll be in Keramzin before the winter turns. Don’t throw me out; I’ve nowhere else to go. I’ll make the most bewitching pig-farmer you’ve ever seen and feed with the sows if it comes to that._

_I hope you’re well._

_-Zoya_

* * *

Three properties meet on a common plot of land swathed by wild mosses: a cottage set against a beautiful flowery bower, inhabited by an old Zemeni couple, then comes their own, and finally a rest-house and teastall supposedly built to accommodate the border patrol troops who sometimes pass by the lower Sokol route, although the stall caters more to farmers and peddlers who come to unwind after a day’s labour, over hot tea and cherry cake. Alina sometimes sees them from her window, smoking and laughing and bantering, sitting around in lazy circles on the rest-house terrace on clear, windy mornings. _Otkazat’sya_. She wishes she could join them, and at the same time, relishes her solitude. Contradiction is a lovely, lethal word to live by.

Where the backyards intersect, a large shed has been constructed, initially held together by grained-wood and spidery wire, now improved by the addition of a jacket of plaster. It’s here that Alina and Zoya find themselves, cloistered together in the uncomfortably humid shack while the storm continues, albeit weaker now. About a foot apart stands the reservoir, the common water source for all three dwellings, a bulky thing of little beauty and much value, occupying pride of place amidst a complicated tangle of masonry, water-pipes, discarded buckets with holes, hand-rakes, shovels and compost mixtures. It draws water from the community tank on the Duke’s estate, which is pumped to every house on the street, but sometimes, like today, it acts up, the motor palpitates and all hell breaks loose.

“Go ahead.”

“You’re the clever one.”

“Someone lied to you, Zoya.”

“I can’t drive the storm away.”

“Lied to you. Several times.”

“Alright that’s quite enough, you ass. Stop patronising me.” Zoya casts a hesitant glance outside, cringing as sleet grates against the walls of the shed, as nebulous darkness billows in the west skies to the direction of the Unsea (or what is left of it anyway; some things just don’t die, as Alina has come to discover much to her chagrin.) “I’ll try.”

“I think I might have some _jurda_ sprigs left-”

“Don’t bother. It’s a little meteorological anomaly. Not worth staining my teeth.” Zoya bends slightly and pulls up the edges of her powder-blue sarafan, tucking the fabric in tight rolls round her thighs, then folding up her sleeves. Her face and neck and the base of her throat are a darker shade than the fair honey-brown of her exposed limbs. There is a faint smattering of scar tissue on her right calf, courtesy a bloodhound that had mauled her leg when she was five. Alina has, with true cartographic precision, committed all of those scars and every tale behind them to memory, it comes easily to her; Zoya Nazyalensky is a talker and she brags when she can, loudly, flamboyantly, about her many exploits of power and perfection and pleasure ( _I am a triple threat_ , she’d once announced to Tamar and Nadia in a giddy brandy-overdose-induced euphoria), colouring anecdotes, contorting and twisting events with the liquid skill of a painter figuring out his signature blend. Horrifically, she has realised of late that she quite enjoys Zoya’s sensational jabberwocky. Even craves it, if she is to be brutally honest with herself, though Alina Starkov has always hated self-confrontation.

But Grisha magic is as seductive as it is demanding, it sings within the blood of the Summoner, it fills the veins with an obscene craving. _Go_ _deeper, further, quicker._ As the Squaller steps outside to work away the storm, Alina stops, unable to help herself, breaking her own promise of staying away from demonstrations of any kind, wanting nothing more but to watch Zoya draw from the same deep well that’s run bone-dry for her quite a while ago.

True to form, she gives it everything.

At home, mawkish and idle, sprawled on the rug in a lacy silver negligee, she is the epitome of a sulky mistress, smelling of strawberry body-butter and sweat and whatever perfume she dabs against her honey-coloured décolletage. But on the field, playing her part, working her powers, Zoya seems to have descended from some warrior-seraph hybrid who’s cut her way out from a chasm in the skies. She raises her slim, muscled arms, poised like a Suli air-dancer, a celestial empress surveying her territory, everything crackling in a pre-apocalyptic silence.

And then she unleashes herself.

The heavens open, ready to shift colours at Zoya’s beck and call. She moves lightly, hair, and skirts swishing in a silken mass, her feet barely grazing the mud, her arms outstretched, almost as if in prayer, as she manipulates the air, stabilises pressure around them, forces the torrents to cease velocity. From where they stand, Alina sees the underbellies of clouds. Green, violet, anthracite flashes.

_Grisha power makes us strong._

She manoeuvres herself like a bird mid-flight. Alina has never seen movement of such elegance. Evenly matched, the storm and the storm witch.

_Just another of life’s little ironies._

It only takes an hour.

She breathes lightning.

She banishes the gale with her bare hands, laughing triumphantly as the clouds part.

_Or maybe it’s the vicarious living through borrowed glory. The grebe wallowing in the praise of the swan._

Slowly, shaking off the pall, a shimmering streak of twilight. A small band of stars.

Glistening with perspiration, Zoya spins around and grins. A private, _not-bad-for-an-out-of-practice-Grisha_ grin meant only for her (only about _her,_ for _her._ Alina feels most passionately about this, it’s the most important of discoveries ever made in Small Science, Squaller Zoya Nazyalensky _only_ grins for Former Sun Summoner Alina Starkov. Hypothesis proved). Strides across the farm to where Alina is standing, excited to hear her verdict, dripping rainwater and zeal.

“I didn’t take _jurda_. Wasn’t I good?”

Suddenly, devastatingly, awareness.

Of the wealth of glossy black curls falling to Zoya’s waist, brushing the apples of her cheeks. Of her face and neck, flushed from the exertion. Of the thin cotton of her sarafan, soaked by the downpour, clinging to her body, accentuating the ridges on her stomach, her long, sleek, muscled limbs, the swell of her breasts. Of the unsettling beauty in the revelation that wherever her skin is exposed to the gaze, it seems to gleam gold, like she’s drank from the fire of the sun.

Alina feels the weight and pull of every force in the world at once. The work of the planets and the stars and every trance and every wonder and every saint together turning her brain to knotted wool, stealing her one trump card: her terse humour, her brevity. It’s nothing like any of those ugly twisted calls she’d fought to avoid when she was the Darkling’s pawn, a rag-doll held together by fetters and collars and bones of dead creatures. What she feels now is warm, and awestricken. And _alive_.

Somewhere universes away, where another Alina Starkov is still capable of some civility, she hears herself go, “You were. That was impressive.”

(Not like she _hasn’t_ noticed of course, not like she hasn’t been overwhelmed _before_. It’s always been there, nestling somewhere inside of her, from her Little Palace and gold _kefta_ days. But today, it slides in like a knife.)

“I must have a word with Nikolai. That was definitely Squaller work. Felt the charge.” Zoya’s arms are shaking from the impact. “Give me your hand,” she says breathlessly. “No, the other one. The _jurda_.”

She stretches out her left palm, her fingers coated with sticky orange mush. Zoya considers it, and for a moment, Alina thinks she detects a flicker of disgust cross her face as she inspects the crushed flowers.

“Not the prettiest,” she mumbles lamely. _Something for nothing, et cetera._

“No. Does the work though.”

“You managed quite fine without it.”

“But the skies aren’t clear yet.”

“I see. So that’s what you’re going to do. Spend your days battling the elements as Guardian of Ravkan feed and fodder. Noble sentiments.”

“How unbecoming of a Saint to speak so coarsely.” Zoya prods a finger at the edge of Alina’s wrist, where _jurda_ sap has bled out in fat orange swatches. “Ugh.”

She hopes Zoya doesn’t notice the tremor of her hand.

_You’re behaving like a loon. Pull your damn self together, woman._

“If it’s too foul, don’t take it.”

“Hell, there’s work to do,” comes the reply.

And then, Zoya lifts the Sun Saint’s fingers to her mouth and just licks the goddamned _jurda_ off, in a move that’s equal parts pure spite and blasphemous nonchalance.

_Help. Sankta Lizabeta._

She cannot-

She will _not_ -

_You fought the volcra._

_The volcra can go fly a kite._

_They didn’t have very deep dimples. They couldn’t snuff out storms like melting candles._

_They were the nightmares of Ravka._

_Emphasis on were._

To this end-

“There’s some left here,” she mumbles, flipping her wrist a fraction of an inch, to show a last remaining smear of jurda.

She wishes she’d doused herself in a hot _jurda_ bath.

She wishes hot _jurda_ baths were a thing.

Zoya laughs then, laughs against her palm. It’s a stampede of a laugh. Formidable, and harsh and gut-wrenchingly lovely. It makes her feeble. It razes her to the ground.

 _I’m a false Saint. You might have noticed that about me_.

So, when she is asked if she plans on standing and gawking the whole day with no intention of getting a scrap of work done at all, Alina leaves without having to be told again. Leaves the farm and Zoya and whatever she’s learnt and unlearnt about herself in the storm. And walks in. Shaking.

* * *

_Why did she agree?_

_She had hated her in Os Alta. Hated her guts. What she did, how she moved, how she set her snares, how she timed her insults when it came to Alina. Alina’s powers, Alina’s poverty, Alina’s partners._

_Now, with a war behind them, and a terrible uncertainty about the life ahead, she tries to bury the hatchet. Mend old bonds._

_A miscalculation._

_With Zoya, it is never easy._

_She tries to reach a middle ground. Fails._

_And Zoya doesn’t help. She ignores her complaints, litters the house, uses up her pine salts, nags Alina to get up early and make her a ‘fucking cup of tea, that’s all’. She is irreverent, feckless, opinions spilling out of her like viscous tar-oil. It is so easy to hate her. One little push. Alina has already crossed that path once._

_But, you see-_

_These are complicated things, big things._

_It’s what she has sought to avoid all her life. Convolutions._

_Back at the valley, when she would sketch Ravka’s terrain in candlelit darkness, the contours never found their way back together. Her country was shifting in the dark, morphing into a beast that fed off shadows and wars. Rivers dried on fake blue lines. Cities were never where they were expected, torn down by enemy crossfire, or bulked up with guzzling land from conquered territories. Ravka dazzled with her beauty when you looked at the map, oceans flanking her sides, brushed by a patina of Grisha magic, the entrepȏrt of opulence. Up close, however, she was a wretched thing, pillaged, shattered, her flimsy dolled-up garb ripped open by a hideous black flesh-wound._

_That last mark is now gone. Yet Ravka remains a fallen woman, her bruises sizzling in the rime of the aftermath._

_Too much to say. Too much to untangle. Not enough space in one roll of gridded paper. Scales are treacherous; they compress battlegrounds into small, disarmingly plain dots and flecks. Easy to miss. Easy to forget._

_It’s a hard job, and it’s an ugly one too. But to one starved of beauty, there are always distractions._

_For example._

_Zoya’s eyes are so very blue. Zoya’s lips are so prettily plump. Her hair smells nice. She makes Alina laugh. She laughs herself too, and she has dimples. She sings in two tongues, bites into blood oranges and spits the seeds at Alina, grinning like the devil._

_Zoya won’t be mapped. Won’t be locked in grids and coordinates. She is the split in the permafrost. The sudden cloudburst that sends rivers spiralling out-of-course. The dangerous magnificence of an uncharted spectacle resisting explanation._

_Also-_

_Alina cannot bring herself to hate her. She looks like a Saint. It would be sacrilege to hate a Saint._

_So she does what any mapmaker would do. She sketches over the biggest tangles in her life, strips them down and splices them up to the simplest bits. The approximations. The general, formless parts. Not very defined perhaps, but they would keep a soldier on her feet. For someone who fights a battle a day, for someone who led the war home and into her body, it should be so easy. Laughably easy._

_The thing is-_

_With Zoya, it is never easy._

_Alina knows this now._

* * *

Later, they head back to the shed, the skies all but stripped of any turbulence, Zoya complaining she feels the onset of a cold. “Which goes to show nothing good ever comes from helping the _otkazat’sya_ ,” she grouches, inching closer to the samovar. “They’ll put it down to the benediction of some bloody saint and starve themselves to pay their respects. Funny folk.”

“You’re being very indiscreet now about hating me,” Alina laughs, perched atop the reservoir.

“Well there, now you’ve said it yourself, you gremlin.”

“I took you in. I put up with your walking nightmare of a personality for much more than the average human limit of twenty seconds. That’s an achievement I’m proud of.”

“Proud of what?!”

Alina begins to reply, but the answer wouldn’t be nice, and she hates unwarranted melodrama. Even if it’s true. Keramzin and country life and their daily verbal duels suit her just fine. She knows it’s not mutual, Zoya would sell a limb to get back to the capital ( ~~she’s not sure there haven’t already been attempts~~ ). So silence it is. While Zoya sips hot tea and massages her dainty feet- too dainty for a soldier! some people just have it all!-she works, trying to locate the faults, fix the leaks.

_How the mighty have fallen to render plumbing services!_

_Excellent, this is exactly the kind of imperialist boorishness one would radiate after prolonged exposure to Zoya Nazyalensky_. _Put your hands to some use._

Alina’s hands are the hands of a pianist. Slender, elegant, nimble despite the annoying double-joints, which she cracks often and loudly, whenever a sudden spat at the breakfast table or unkind words exchanged slurrily over beers demand moderations. There had been a piano at the Little Palace, at the orphanage too, and sure, Ana Kuya had said she wasn’t wholly irredeemable when it came to hitting the proper keys, but she’s never voluntarily attempted to make music of any sort. There are certain parts of herself she prefers to wrap more tightly into her shell, parts she can never show anybody again, not Nikolai, who’d tease her, neither Genya, whose sympathy would make her feel the worse for it...and definitely _not_ Mal. No one to share with, no one to try and impress.

Except maybe the woman sitting before her.

Somehow, she finds herself not quite loathing the prospect.

“I never expected to get out of that place,” Zoya says quietly.

“Huh?”

“Out of Os Alta,” she explains, impatiently. “You know- the city. The one with the palaces and lakes. The royal capital.” An exasperated pause. “You aren’t listening.”

No, she isn’t. For the past quarter-hour, Alina has been immersed in patching up corroded metal and stealing sips of _kvas_ from a cheap sealskin flask, half-amusedly casting glances at the lighter band of skin on Zoya’s wrist where she once wore her silver tiger-teeth amplifier. But she doesn’t need any explanations; she knows. And what’s more, _Zoya_ knows of her knowing: she knows Alina understands what she means by her words and why she doesn’t wear the bracelet anymore, and why exactly she turned up at her door ten fortnights back, soaked to the bone by a storm quite as hideous as this one.

 _You got my letter, didn’t you. Now move_.

Even so, for all their mutual awareness of whatever the heck it is friends -Alina assumes they are friends now- are supposed to know about each other, Zoya looks like a person with an ocean floor of secrets, burdened by too heavy a load, most of which she doesn’t deserve to carry, not now, not after so much has happened, the Darkling’s attack and the Novokribirsk massacres and other sinister things she wouldn’t dream of asking her. It’s been months since the War, but she can gauge its insidious toll on every soldier of the Second Army. Initially when rage had overpowered rationale, she’d wished the Squaller would turn out to be a traitor, serving and believing in Morozova’s cause; that would be the end of Zoya Nazyalensky in her life. What happened with Mal didn’t help either: for days Alina had nursed too fresh, too raw, salted wounds that ruptured at the oddest moments and didn’t heal over days, weeks. And when they did, there were plenty of other reminders of the grief that had swept over them. She had seen it in Nikolai’s scars and Genya’s face and Sergei’s lisp, in the starless eyes of Baghra, in the hundred gleaming memorials and chapels that had sprung up like flowers over the country ever since that one fateful morning within the black gut of the Fold. But mostly, mostly Alina had seen the shadow of the war within herself. How she’d become a fumbling mockery of what she had been. A pathetic, insecure, helpless, mewling thing. Somewhere along the line, her prayers for vengeance at night had gotten garbled through thick tears, and then she had prayed harder for no more war, no more deaths.

Oh, there’s been regret alright. But the shame that remains is too revolting, and she still cries sometimes in her sleep, till her eyes sting and bile rises to the roof of her mouth. She wishes, then, for Genya to be at her side and curl into bed with her, and for Mal to hold her in that calm blue gaze and tell her to _stop claiming every battle to your name, things are going to change, it gets easier_.

But they aren’t there. Her friends are gone. Ravka calls.

“How did Nikolai take it?” she finds herself asking. It is wondrous that they haven’t talked about this before, but it has always seemed to be one of those issues they have silently agreed upon avoiding. Until today, this wondrous day swamped in darkness, forced into each other’s company.

“He didn’t say anything.” Zoya shrugs, looking down at the pleats of her skirts. “I didn’t expect him to. He just kind of slumped in, like he always does after a particularly bad day. Genya did, though. She wept and clung to me, asked me what was going wrong. You’d think I had suggested I was going to fling myself off the Grand Palace roof.”

Alina slowly inhales, puffs her cheeks, and lets it out in a telltale gesture. “You have to understand.”

“Oh saints, I do. It’s been pretty rough for all of us, no? But she knew she couldn’t change my mind this time. Some ministerial ass got into it with our little prince, said it was about the order against the king, you know, Genya’s case....anyway, he overstepped...quite a bit...there were a slew of reports, I could see it was making her poorly, reliving all of that, so Nikolai told him to step down or have his office be confiscated for contempt against a Triumvirate member. The old reprobate lost it and told him to shove it where it hurts. It didn’t go all that well. He didn’t speak like that to my king and expect to make it out alive. ” She laughs in that high, nervous way Alina has come to associate with her moments of utter humiliation. “Anyway, to keep it brief: it took three Healers to surgically extract the teeth he’d swallowed. Now you know. Give me that fucking _kvas_.”

She reaches for her, but Zoya draws away, drink in hand, speaking with her former composure. “Anyway, one night, there was a disturbance among the small councils. They began wailing about favouritism, how Nikolai’s _nearest-and-dearest_ can’t be questioned, how the country’s not safe with sorcerers and shamans at its administrative centre... they were saying something about Shu Han; I don’t remember what, nothing you need to know anyway, it was probably racist. Some of the older ministers had gotten worked up into a foul mood, and they began to lash out at us when we told them to keep their voice down. You know I’ve never been the patient sort... I didn’t put up with the Apparat’s nonsense back at the Cathedral, I didn’t put up with Stigg- I didn’t have to put up with these marauding idiots now. Or so I thought? Whatever, we adjourned the meeting and I locked myself in my room and hoped it would pass.”

“I’m guessing it didn’t.”

“Well done, _tsaritsa_. In my defence, however, it usually took a few hours, two days at most for them to have coddled their egos good enough and calm down. Except this time, they took my little gesture of goodwill rather ill- I’m betting one of those fellows had made a move on Genya back when she worked for the Queen and been shoved away- and he took it out on us, which is kind of hilarious, if you think about it, Alina, because Ravka would be burning a long time back had it not been for the _degenerate whores_ he screamed at.”

“Saints.”

Zoya pauses, puts down the flask, and presses the flat of her palms against a pipe, until the knuckles are almost white. “Of course, no fight’s a good fight without the classic hit below-the-belt. So when I came to court the next day to see exactly what the hell was on, they shoved their bile at me. _Vasily is dead, our king exiled_ , _and a pretender sits on the throne, running the country to the whims and fancies of the Darkling’s whore_. That’s what they said to him.”

“About me?”

For the first time, the Squaller speaks without cynicism, her voice laced with hurt. “No. Can’t you guess though?”

Oh. _Oh._ Of course. There was a terrible time she’d though such things herself. She wishes she didn’t remember.

“That, I think, that was it. You know, when you are just teetering on the edge of things and you need that push? Fuck, I _wanted_ it. Part of me was happy they said it, thrilled. It validated why I was feeling like shit all these days. Why I wanted to scream, because since the war, we’d has just fallen into a rut and never gotten up. And the silence was killing me. So I wrote to you”-a tiny theatrical flourish, a half-hearted cocky smile, “because one, I wouldn’t have to grovel on the streets or save face at Tamar’s. Two, I’ve heard I’m gorgeous to look at. Figured you need something pretty in your little cottage of horrors to pull you through.” She looks keenly at her, waiting for the laugh, the _bitch_ that doesn’t come from her mouth. “What, no quip?”

Alina looks up into her eyes. They are very blue eyes, seeming darker than they really are, because of her long black lashes. She is gorgeous alright, with her wild black hair and effortless sophistication, yet the crux of her gorgeousness is difficult to pin down; she is harder, taller than most women Alina ever knew, battle-scarred and muscled - more angular than Genya or Nadia, less alluring to those who judge by soft curves and hollows.

But her eyes, her eyes alone could bring down empires. Peerless. Deep sea-blue against the rich dark golden-brown of her face. _A brooding artist’s magnificent muse._ She smiles at the analogy, at herself for having thought of it, and at Zoya, who is surely expecting some feeble reassurance.

“You ever noticed a possible anagram for Apparat is _art papa?”_

She sees the older girl start, and then she laughs, _fuck off Starkov_ , and leans back into her seat, taking a swig from the flask. Something opens up in her, a sort of warm, honey-jars-in-the-sun feeling.

They sit for awhile, tranquil in the blue, chilly phosphorescence of twilight. It’s stopped raining, and outside everything glistens. Alina becomes aware of a ring of silvery moths hovering around the lamp, directly stationed above her head. She hopes none of them will fly into it. Eventually, Zoya reaches forth and takes her hand ( _Starkov’s exclusively beautiful pianist hand_ ). She lets her, and they sit together, Zoya’s palm soft against her callused hand, while Alina thinks how wonderful it is that nothing remains of time anymore except the frosted evening before them.

* * *

_A question, why here, of nowhere?_

_It’s hot and damp, the roof on the roof, with its smell of fruit and froth, and the sour twang from a row of metal vats, lined up in decreasing order of size against the walls. No light enters this room, except through tiny cracks in roof slats. And sometimes, Zoya forgets to close the door, but she’s getting over it, slowly._

_A large black cauldron sits at the centre of the room. Always spilling over with batches of fruit preserves. Salts and spices. Hint of fried plantains, fresh arrivals in wooden crates all the way from Reb Harbour._

_Hot Bubbling Witchy Love-Philtres, they jest. Made by Morozova’s Wicked Witches. One spoon to beguile a man, five if you want him dead._

_Sometimes on particularly hot days, they sleep out on the roof. Alina objects emphatically on using bug nets._

_“I don’t want anything between me and the stars. It’s romantic.”_

_“As are stink-beetles and wasps no doubt. Oh, and those big spiders, the ones with the markings.”_

_“You’re so upbeat, Zoya.”_

_“Upbeat_ and _unbitten.”_

_“Haha.”_

_During Harvest Nights and feasts, they spend all day on the roof, wearing their keftas in deference to Ravka’s glory, Zoya in Etherealki blue, she in Sol Koroleva gold, watching processions head down from the village cathedral by the woods, candles twinkling in the dark, faint wafts of music sweetening crisp night air. She likes the music, likes how it does not drown out every other sound, like when she swallows some tea or when Zoya taps a pen down a sheaf of paper, perusing the monthly mail from the Little Palace. She patches an old pair of military trousers (how Mal’s ghost lurks in the linens!) while Zoya exclaims impatiently over yet another ministerial clash, another scandal surrounding the Apparat, some palace gossip courtesy Genya._

_“Nikolai’s looking for a wife.”_

_“About damn time.”_

_“He was forced to.”_

_“Good.”_

_“By Tamar and Genya.”_

_“Good.”_

_She skips the military operation pages-_ Tsibeya Fifth Light Infantry Regiment were under _\- and reads out something funny. A silly note by Tamar about an Inferni found in bed with a Kerch merchant or suchlike._

 _Funny: the way fruit-flies swarm towards the gauze doors_ _and then their bodies ricochet like pebbles off Zoya’s face and shoulders. Oh, fuck my life._

_Jars of honey sit on the rooftop-edge, waiting patiently for a slice of sun to warm them. Did you know the honey found in the catacombs of Cofton is still fresh and good? Did you know that Zoya? Warm, melty-liquid gold, almost dark brown at the bottom. Great to dip spoons into when winter nights are here, their translucent bases full of stars._

_Also star-bright: Alina’s hair. Not exactly blonde, but a kind of rich, sugary-white. And anyway, when night does fall, it all looks the same. Her hair and Zoya’s eyes and the silver-gold swirls on their abandoned keftas, everything, everything dances in pure, unblemished starlight._

* * *

Summer. And with it the irresistible desire to shove everything she touches into the cellar ice-box, including herself.

Several counselling sessions and unnecessary coffees later, Alina agrees with Tamar and Nadia that yes, maybe she should do something more attuned to her interests than merely picking out overripe berries and digging up trenches. Truth be told, she _could_ do with some more noise, some more vibrancy.

Her companion doesn’t berate her either. “You were being held-up, you are made for better things,” she remarks the night Alina informs her about her decision to build the school. She knows Zoya hated the long hours alone in the house while she worked in the fields, hated being left alone to her thoughts. _In that we are together, at least._

With unnerving zest and plentiful hair-sashaying initiative, General Nazyalensky, _Etherealnik extraordinaire_ \- ventures on a series of bone-grinding tasks: finding a proper plot of land, obtaining a lease, making sure that the location is appropriately idyllic, easily connected to the market and the ferry docks, that it isn’t _too_ misanthropic for children, but not _too_ heavily surrounded by dwellings to allow for any possibility of exasperating encounters. “It’s called a compromise,” she says proudly. “I am making small sacrifices. For you.”

“How noble. I thought the children were our priority here.” Yet Alina cannot help but smile.

For all her well-intentioned jabber, Zoya is barely home. The tables have turned, now _she’s_ the one who’s always out odd hours, running some errand or other, looking into blueprints and heating systems and gardening spots and whatever else the school to-be might need, sometimes accompanied by Nadia (enjoying a brief retreat from royal business). She says she is _readjusting to what she’d stood for_ \- which Alina thinks is laughable because when did she ever deign it her place to mentor the _rural riff-raff_?-Zoya Nazyalensky is the ultimate blue-blooded, blue-eyed ice princess, isn’t she? Oh, well. She irons their clothes, leaves some _kvas_ for Zoya in the flask and spends most of her time taking long baths, to scrub out the oily film settling on her skin when the evenings are especially sultry, and more importantly, to think.

She has a lot on her mind, in all honesty.

For a brief intermediate period after Mal had left, Alina took lovers. Juggled them, occasionally. Demyan, whom she’d accosted- or maybe _he_ had accosted her?- some five times in the restrooms of five equally cheap pubs on the downriver route to Tsemna. Inna from the farmer’s market; he had gotten her into cheap brandy and old military campfire ballads. But these were all fleeting liaisons, momentary urges to fuck and be fucked on particularly lonely, particularly dangerous nights when she was not quite herself. Then, shame, and always, always the self-loathing. When she lay under whichever man she’d brought back to her house that night, when she did whatever you’re supposed to do after you’ve gotten what you wanted, meticulously swapping bodies and faces with tawny skin, ruffled brown hair, bright blue eyes, and inked insignia on the firm column of the spine.

It’s not possible to place a finger on one particular thing that had gone wrong. Like all others who had been in the thick of the fighting, they’d had their share of troubles. After the war, Alina’d changed in ways she’d herself been unable to comprehend. Mood swings, frequently, plus that _goddamn indecisiveness_ , tripled when all her friends grew distant, leaving her to fend for herself. Then of course, the nightmares, the constant hysterical dread of dark corners and too-close whispers and lots of retching against the sides of poorly lit outhouses. _You’re a mess_ , Mal had once told her when he’d woken up for the third time in a week to find her sleep-talking , disoriented and delirious, with some man called Aleksander. _You’re a fucking mess and I’m going to spend my life cleaning up after you_. He’d said it with a mock-groan, and had brushed off her apologies with reassurances and kisses, but it would take a fool of monumental proportions to miss the resignation and deadbeat hopelessness in his voice. Even as Alina had loathed him for saying this, she’d known her husband was right. She clung onto everyone she loved until her love suffocated them. She was a mess. And she needed time. More time, plenty of time to bring herself back together.

What she’d forgotten however, was that Malyen hated waiting.

She can’t blame him. They have always bonded the strongest over their shared pathological fear of uncertainty.

Uncertainty has sugar-white hair, makes fruit preserves on the roof and vomits every night. Surety has hair the brown of old oak, an open laugh, and a smattering of freckles across the nose patterned like a constellation.

_I can’t spend the rest of my life waiting for you to make up your mind if you care or not. How can you expect me to know what you’re thinking? You don’t even know yourself._

Not that she’d expected anything else, but Mal’s words still sting, and the positively livelier stories of thrilling expeditions that the Tsibeya regiment (his comrades, his companions, his friends)embarks on, all of which she uncovers from Tamar’s letters, still eats away at her insides sometimes. It’s hardly surprising, this refrain of never _fucking being good enough_ that has been her constant companion for all her life. She’s lived with it for as long as she can recall, her own egg-twin, first as a mere stripling of a girl in Duke Keramsov’s orphanage, then in the army, excluded and shunned from every clique, then as something else, something different at the capital, with Nikolai and all her Grisha Friends. An acute sense of estrangement. Not as beautiful as Genya, not as confident as Zoya, not as fiery as Tamar. And now, her greatest misfortune remains that she is not even good enough at loving someone. Second-place silver, forevermore.

_Malyen Oretsev. Alina Starkov. They died on the Fold._

_One of them was brought to life anew with a false name. He was a soldier. A gifted fellow. A hero. His country needed him._

_The other was left behind._

_No name, no face, no halo, no crown. A liability._

_When her time came, Ravka canonised the Saint._

_When her time came, Ravka forgot the girl._

* * *

Lying on a mattress, orange slice in mouth, she skims through Genya’s scrawls, reading up whatever new bullshit decree Nikolai’s team are working on now, so that she doesn’t feel completely dumb when talking politics with the villagers during their weekly after-church luncheon (the Keramzin crowd is a political sort, the sort she’d religiously sought to avoid in her army days). Invariably, Zoya walks in late, goes _this fucking weather_ _again_ , and paces around the parlour, waiting for the samovar to do its thing. Out of the corner of her eye Alina observes her, tracks her movements, the bubbling impatience that comes from bottling up a storm in a mason jar. The school isn’t really Zoya’s thing, but at least she shall get to occupy herself with a semblance of productivity, instead of, say, renting tears through the ceiling with her hungry-volcra howls in the throes of ennui.

Briefly, she wonders if she’s being too uncharitable.

_Why was she cast away?_

_Why did they let her leave?_

Nikolai had claimed her to be indispensable. _What went wrong?_

_Did they find her full of rage?_

_Did they tire of her because she was Alina’s flip-coin shadow, too volatile, too dominant, aggressively tending to her grudges_?

_Had they tried to tame her?_

Perhaps this is it. Perhaps the most binding of all the bonds which keep her close to this girl is the knowledge that they’ve both fallen short of whatever Ravkan standard it is that takes in the measure of despairing women. Perhaps.

She watches Zoya pour out a cup of tea, watches as she looks up and tries to smile through her exhaustion. A sudden rush of love catches Alina Starkov unaware.

* * *

“You need a haircut.”

Alina ignores her, head bent in concentration over the map of Keramzin Kuzma’s made her. She clicks her tongue, draws a red cross over one patch. “That’s lowland, that’s out; we’ll be schooling in the marshes when it rains.”

“You look like a crone.”

“I look like a siren. This area behind the church is pretty but it’s too close, no? Also these are village folk. To send children round the burial grounds, they won’t like that. Out.”

“Are you ignoring me?”

“I’m indifferently paying attention.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Zoya, Zoya, darling Zoya,” she uses that sickly-sweet, royal handmaiden voice that would make Genya proud. “This is a life-or-death question we’re dealing with here.”

“Call me darling again, Starkov.”

“How disrespectful. It’s Sankta Alina. Now be quiet, _darling_ , or I’ll curse you with my saintly powers, and let you burn in hellfire. Besides, you don’t want to herd a bunch of waifs in eternal terror of unfriendly churchyard ghosts, do you?”

Zoya pulls a face. “ _You_ look like a ghost anyway, with your stupid pale hair.”

“I thought you liked it.” _The whole moon maiden look_ , she’d called it. Alina remembers it well, remembers too how the rain sparkled like rhinestones against Zoya’s lashes that night. ( ~~Mapmaker’s memory~~. ~~Necessary emotional coping~~. Nothing science cannot explain away with kiln-baked facts.) “You found it very fancy. A real beauty tip.”

“I’ve grown bored of it.”

“Good circular thinking. Just hack out whatever bores you with gardening shears.”

“So when _Genya_ does it it’s fun and dolling-up and when _I_ do it it’s all kinds of-”

“Alright, alright, deep breaths.” Alina pushes away her maps and pens, rises from her seat and undoes her braid, finger-combing self-consciously through the ivory strands. Her hair hasn’t gotten a trim since day one at the Little Palace. _Eons_ have passed. She’s gone from mousy brunette to moon-maiden to hardy ginger farmer to beatified undercover saint. She’s grown rather fond of wearing it long.

_~~Mal liked it long. Mal liked it brown. Traitor.~~ _

She swallows.

Pushes it down.

Turns to face Zoya.

“I don’t want to look like a choir boy. Don’t be too vicious okay?”

A flash of teeth, a slitting of blue eyes. “I’m _nothing_ if not vicious.”

Oh, saints.

* * *

Zoya doesn’t have pianist hands. But her touch is light and soft, and that combined with the steady soothing clipping of the gold-handled scissors and heavy lush buzz of the dragonflies outside practically lulls Alina to a languid vegetative state. Minimal thought. Minimal action.

Blood-orange peels bask in the sun, filling the air with their citrusy fragrance. _Good for your skin,_ Zoya insists _. You have to rub them against the dead flaky skin. My aunt had taught me._

White hair falls to the ground.

Spun-sugar clouds.

_Profane desecration._

Somewhere, a child sings on the street.

The sensation of bareness on her neck. Zoya’s breathe against her ear as she snips the locks from the side, her eyebrows furrowed.

She feels the weight of the winter fall down her shoulders.

_Orange is what the air smells like. Orange, and happy, and summery._

Zoya’s hands against her scalp. Summer melts on her eyelids.

Then-

“Oh fuck.” The clatter of scissors against the floor. “Oh _fuck_.”

Alina starts. “What did you do?!”

A hand against her mouth, Zoya stifles a grunt. “Nothing, oh- oh _Sankt Juris_. This is a disaster.”

“Did you just call upon a saint?” _Now_ she’s terrified. “Please tell me what you did.”

She’s handed a mirror along with a panicked, belated reminder: “I told you to warn me if you felt I was overdoing it!”

 _What unsightly massacre has commander Nazyalensky engineered_? Alina peeks into the glass. Sucks in her breath.

Her first thought is _not that bad_. Her thick white hair has been brutally lopped off from the lower waist to just above shoulder-level, and the ends look jagged and uneven like broken mirror shards. But aside that, and aside from the fact that with this severe haircut she looks more malnourished and scruffier than ever, it isn’t very awful. “Yes, what?”

“It’s too short!” Zoya practically wails. “I kept trying to even out the sides and practically took it all off! You said you didn’t want to look like a choir boy. _You said_.”

“I know what I said. Have you ever seen the Feast day choirs at Adena? Those little boys have the most gruesomely uniform cuts. Oil practically dribbles down to their shoulders.”

“But do you like this... _look_?”

“I don’t see the problem. Except my face, which is unfortunately not something I can pin on you. Do I look like a runaway Fjerdan convict? Slightly. Do I look like I’ve gotten ringworms? Probably. But do I look like the choir boys I dread? No, not at all. Therefore, rest easy.”

A pregnant pause. Alina fears she has been too garrulous.

Until Zoya begins to laugh.

Hard, harsh, her gunfire of a laugh. Not the tinkly giggles she’d bestow on brain-dead, melancholic wide-eyed hopefuls at the Palace. It’s not meant to bewitch, only to _express_. She grips the back of the chair, rubs a hand across her welling eyes.

Wildly, Alina wonders what would happen if Zoya took the leap of faith from where she stood. If she laughed so hard she would have to lean forward and close the distance between them.

_Brush skin against skin._

_One warm orange moment._

She smothers the scream that rises in her throat. Clamps her hands beneath her thighs. _Never_.

It’s too much.

Too much.

It’s like.

An artery torn open.

Spurting red.

“I didn’t separate from Mal because of the army problem. We separated because he made me feel like a burden.”

The summer flees. The dragonflies die. The song stops.

“What?!”

She thinks it’s a bad idea.

She thinks she’ll get up, and walk out and leave.

_Never look back. Leave._

_This house, this woman, this village, this goddamned godforsaken country._

Instead her mouth forms words. _Malyen. Marriage. Military_. She begins to speak, and her words taste coppery, like blood between her teeth.

The economy of misery. The auctioning of losses.

_You don’t even know yourself._

“I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t work. I wasn’t happy. I needed to mend. But there wasn’t enough time. He wanted me. He wanted me to want him back.”

_Would you still come to me, Zoya, if you knew what I’ve done? How I weaponised my pain?_

She had made herself sick with thoughts of Aleksander. Gotten drunk on his curse until she could forge her own nightmares. She had eaten, and vomited out everything.

Besides.

 _Clenching and unclenching in the dark_. _Black blood_. She’d seen black blood that night.

“It wasn’t an accident. I lied to Genya. I got rid of it.”

_What do you know of my grief? Would you have written, Zoya?_

_Would you have stayed?_

“Because you were too young.” Zoya’s whisper sounds so far-away.

“Because I didn’t want a child. I’ve always loved children. I’ve never wanted a child. That was Mal’s wish. I have always let him down. I hated letting him down again. But I couldn’t.”

She remembers that precise moment.

The moment it happened. The moment she knew.

The moment she broke.

“This is no country, no world to bring up a child. But Mal had a dream. I told him maybe we could foster Misha. But he wanted....he wanted a part of us.”

_You wouldn’t do that. Not in a million years._

_You’re not the girl I knew._

_Why didn’t you tell me anything?_

“What did you do, Alina?”

_Focus. Breathe. Forget._

_Try not to think of all that blood. Try not to think of what he said. Try not to think of how you felt._

Her voice crippled by defeat, Alina replies, “Whatever it took to get the job done.”

She hears the muffled _thump_ as Zoya sits down heavily at her feet. Looks in the glass to see her massage her temples with her index finger and a thumb. Processing it.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. There’s nothing to say.”

Just a moment ago, the heat was beautiful.

Now it suffocates.

Dead silence. Not the world, no. Just the two of them.

“Well,” Zoya mutters, “if you’d care to know. I don’t think you’re terrible. You are unattractive and shuffling and gloomy and bitter, with appalling taste in clothes. But you’re not terrible.”

She laughs. Because she should. Blinks back hot tears. “Good verdict.”

“Actually I do have something to say.”

She braces herself. For a perfectly needling insult, for a well-deserved slap to the face.

It never comes.

Instead, that night, Zoya tells her about a woman named Liliyana Garin.

* * *

A few years have elapsed since her last visit to the meadow and the wood.

A few years is all it took.

She has a new name now. A new look to her.

The meadow however, remains the same.

Downriver, a newly-created freshwater barrage (administered by a watchful Royal Commission of Tidemakers and Squallers) regulates Sokol waters down to the drainage point: the lagoon near Tsemna, where the rain-fed Obol rises. A mini-town has grown around the barrage. There are talks of creating a floating market, like the ones in Ahmrat Jen.

So much Grisha rain, yet the river resembles an overflowing gutter- fetid, slow, oozing filth like a popped blister. Brown grass –dead, alive, unimportant- clings limply to the sides. Fish feed and fatten on garbage and dyeing factory poisons.

The Sokol had once throbbed like a turquoise heart. It bled itself into the inky whorls of the Fold and a small branch poured a cup of liquid into the lagoon. Alina imagines floating neck-deep in icy water in the Fold, blind, emotionless. One could. If one was insane enough. ( _Not that she isn’t. Only she’d be sanded in now_.) Low-lying log-houses stand on the banks, filled to the brim with dying lepers, paupered war-foundlings and thriving prostitutes.

The slopes of the meadow face away from Sokol, in epithetical pride. They look instead, to the dense groves that mark an entry to forested area, and the view from the hillocks is beautiful. A wire fence marks the south boundary to the Duke’s farms.

Empty, noiseless. A bit cold, in the pre-dawn chill.

She walks.

 _Good for you_ , Nadia tells her. _You should try it. Before sunrise is best, if you feel upto it._

So much advice from everyone.

_How to fix your skin. How to take a walk. How to build a school. How to live your life._

She despises it as much as she craves it. That’s how she has wanted most things in her life. Shot with disgrace, glued together with falters.

The woods thicken. She ventures in, passing the gilded spires of the church, a small relic shop, clearings full of wild blossoms.

There it is.

Standing in a grove all by itself, straight out of a children’s fairy story, the abandoned farmhouse seems to have risen from the earth overnight, succumbing in time to a floral avalanche. Daisies with buttery hearts, pale pink dog roses, trailing vines, a million species she could never put a name to. Flowers droop in heavy bunches from white-wood trees. Butterflies flit in and out of the unbarred windows. Two storeys. Wide open.

Enough space for an orchard at the back. Near enough and far enough, the perfect piece of earth. For a school. For a girl.

She feels like singing aloud.

She could.

If she was insane enough. Not that she isn’t.

On her way back, she takes a detour round the meadow. It takes her a few minutes. She would know her tree anywhere. _Decrepit old thing_. It’ll outlive her, she knows.

From the drawstring pouch at her waist, Alina brings out the knife she keeps on her person at all times. ( _not for intruders, just for fruit_ ) She hacks off their names from the bark.

~~Malyen Oretsev. Alina Starkov.~~

They died on the Fold.

She hopes they rest in peace.

* * *

Kuzma helps her remove some of the more stubborn vegetation. Together, they hack at cobwebs and sweep the leaf-strewn stone yard. Zoya unearths a bunch of keys from under a stump by the front gate, and with it they access the decrepit barn behind the house and a couple of rickety wooden remnants of what were possibly animal pens.

Everything seems to be where they should, despite the smell of decay that clings to each surface, each piece of rotten furniture. A wrought-iron cooking range. A redwood dresser. Hooks on the wall meant to suspend coats.

“I don’t think the pipes work,” Alina announces a while later, when the kitchen taps have been found to emit nothing but a muddy greenish trickle. “We might have to do some terrace rainwater harvesting.”

“Oh great. _Great_.”

“Liliyana,” Alina says warningly, “We are not princesses; we have to make do.”

“Ruby,” comes the biting reply, “I don’t believe we’re _too_ badly-off.”

“In here, girls,” Kuzma calls from the pantry.

They walk inside, her companion shaking her head in disbelief. It’s a dark, musty little room. The counters and cupboards are coated in fine grey ash. Alina sees the shadows shift and move by the grate. She feels a surge of panic and tries to ease her breathing. _Think fool. Think of the things you can have._

“What happened here?” Zoya asks, making a retching gesture as her finger grazes over a bit of sludge by the washbasin. “Where did the people go?”

“Who knows?” Kuzma pulls open the cupboard panels, starts to sort out grimy bottles and containers. “When the Darkling’s soldiers raided the village, many who believed in Sankta Alina-” he draws his hand reverently over his forehead- “they were cut down like pigs for slaughter. Maybe the people who lived here suffered the same fate. I wouldn’t know. I have never ventured beyond the church.”

“The _Darkling_?” Only Alina tastes the menace in the other woman’s voice, only Alina sees her gaze darken.

“You didn’t know, Lili? He had had his men kill the Duke’s housekeeper. Ana Kuya, may the Saints bless her. They say the soldiers strung her from a tree and made the children watch as-”

“Forget I asked,” Zoya waves him away hastily.

Kuzma laughs at that, says something about barn ghosts. Their voices rise and fall as Alina moves from room to room, feeling sick to the pit of her belly. She wonders about the former inhabitants, wonders if she might catch a spirit in a closet, Ana Kuya’s, maybe.

There are clothes in the dresser, a man’s and a woman’s, simple cotton sarafans and rabbit hair coats and hats. In one corner of the master bedroom, a stepladder leads to the attic, and there is a tin of flaky vegetable dye with a ratty brush balanced against it. She pulls it down to the floor, gingerly steps on the rungs, hoists herself with some difficulty to the attic. It’s a sad little space, filled with bales of straw. The roof has given way in some places and feathers, leaves and droppings cover the floor.

Alina plops to the floor. Closes her eyes. Breathes. Downstairs, her friends’ chatter fades away.

_Quiet._

Inside this house, as in her little home back by the farm, Alina feels vaguely like a trespasser. Like she has wrongfully robbed someone of a body, is wearing their skin against their will, snatching their rightful share of air and earth. She tries to picture the couple that had lived here. _What happened to them_? Maybe they’d refused to pay the military tax. Maybe one of the Darkling’s officers had found them, probably Ivan. Maybe this house had stood testimony to more than just the vagaries of nature.

_No, search elsewhere. Don’t look there._

She thinks back to their own cottage, to the shrines and shells and garden and every one of the markers that might live on, long after she is gone, and Zoya too.

_If so much passes on in a house, how much of a person stays after her death? So many ways to feed into systems, to continue life after the cessation of existence. How little physical existence matters._

She thinks she knows death now. She hadn’t understood it during the war. She had feared it, looked upon it with utter resentment. But here, sitting in this tiny attic, she understands.

There are ghosts everywhere.

Sewn into the stitches of their keftas.

Sleeping under the wastes of the Shadow Fold.

Hiding in their aliases. _A dead comrade. A beloved aunt._

Nothing ever really disappears, especially not if you want it to linger on.

Slowly, Alina re-imagines the place. Starts making plans in her head. The Lantsov emerald. The pension savings. Chalk and books and gardening tools. Separate spots for potatoes, onions, beetroots, sweetcorn, sunflowers, maybe some strawberries. Show the children how to feed the chickens, to milk the goats, to make yogurt and cheese. Plant more trees in their orchard, say plum and raspberry, ask Kuzma to teach her to set up a small water-tank. They have enough money for better fences, roof repairs and to repaint the house.

Footsteps.

“May I have a word with you please?”

 _Again! And again!_ “We are taking it.”

“No.” Zoya considers the floor, pulls a woebegone expression and gingerly kneels. “No. This house.... I do not care for it. I don’t like its history. Tell me I’m wrong in thinking so.”

“Why do you hate it?”

“I don’t _hate_ it. I...” Zoya pauses, discomfited. “They say houses with sad pasts feed upon their residents.”

“What, you’re scared of ghosts now?”

“I’m scared of remembering.”

“Then we’ll learn to forget.”

A moment of stillness. Alina runs her hand over the scratchy flooring. "It looks like the kind of house to have hidden treasures in the cellar, don't you think?"

"I _don't_ , in fact, think so. I think there's a ghoul in the cellar."

"Kuzma told me they keep mirrors in the cellars sometimes, to ward away the _malenchki_."

"I will gut you and hang you upside down from a broom cupboard, how's _that_ for hidden treasures?"

She laughs, startling a pair of blue, buff magpies from a windowsill. "Look. Now we know there's treasure."

"You're being rather wildly optimistic about this whole mission, don't you think?"

“Trust me. I can see it so clearly, Zoya, saints, it’s almost _real_. Think of all the children who’ll live here. It’ll be our duty to help them forget the war.”

“Wait! I am not approaching a single kid. You deal with the ruffians. I’ll....oh, I don’t know, clean the coop or something.”

“Is that you saying yes?”

“That’s me saying I have neither the time nor the patience to argue with you. Go ahead by all means, take the haunted house, you seem to be making a private collection of these. I’ll do what I can. Just make Kuzma stop calling me _my pretty Lili_ or I’ll bash his skull.”

Alina laughs, and then feeling unusually bold, leans over and swiftly kisses Zoya’s forehead. “Darling Zoya,” she cooes, imitating the Apparat, “you are _blessed_ in your eternal suffering. The Saints will embrace you in the Better World.”

“I’ll take your word for it, you idiot.” Zoya yanks her head away, and maybe it’s her imagination, but Alina thinks she sees the dimples for just a flash.

She’ll take what she can get. Times are hard for soldiers and saints.

* * *

During supper, they dine in silence. Zoya has fatigue underneath her eyes and fresh scars on her knuckles. _What does she do with her spare time? What does she feel?_

Later, they lie in bed. There is nothing to do or say. They are not lovers, and they are not sisters. But the feel of it is comforting-the hollow of Zoya’s collarbones, where she tucks her head, the crook of her right arm round Alina’s waist, tightening as the night grows colder. She presses her face to the Grisha’s ribs, and can hear the unsteady, wavering rhythm of her heart. Unconsciously, her knee jerks in beat, an atrocious habit she’s picked up from military camp.

Zoya places a hand against the juncture of her leg. “Cut it.”

“It’s an army thing.”

“Well, the army thing’s grinding against my pelvis. And I mean it in a non-flattering way.”

“I liked the house today,” begins Alina, and then immediately regrets saying it. She tries to detect a reaction in the darkness and ends up adding as a sort of statutory warning, “Stop that.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“You were feeling it. You were going to say it.”

“What?”

“That you think I’m being a martyr and taking on trials unnecessarily.”

“I think you’re a dunce. Going back to your ghastly roots and trying to reconnect or whatever.”

“I just want to compensate.”

“You’re a dunce.”

“Wouldn’t _you_ rush back to Os Alta the very minute Nikolai calls for you?”

“That’s different,” Zoya snaps. “That’s duty, not self-harm. I know I’m the best of the Summoners and God knows Ravka could do with a few powerful soldiers. You wouldn’t understand. The war has gotten into your head.”

“It’s gotten into yours too. I know how you feel.”

“You don’t know _anything_ of how I feel,” Zoya laughs, but her laugh is powdered glass. “Being a Suli, being a black-lister, Morozova’s rejected favourite- you don’t know, alright? So stop trying to get into my head. I don’t miss being a soldier.”

Alina lightly brushes her hand across her friend’s face. She means to find her cheek, but instead her fingers graze across Zoya’s lips. She laughs again, and pulls away from her.

“I am not thinking about Os Alta,” she says. “I’ve no reason to.”

A lie, but a forgivable one. Alina has her own trove of them, little white lies she sows to keep herself from teetering over the chalky line. That is why she lets her pass. Only that.

When dawn breaks over Keramzin, and some shape-shifting nightmare of a dead couple in an abandoned barn startles her awake, Alina finds the two of them entwined like a pair of conjoined twins, fingers clasped in tight, unbroken networks. Zoya looks almost ill in this light. Older, somewhat. Weaker.

They are not so unalike. They are both guilty of taking up too much space in a world that thrives off scarcities and constrictions. Of late their fates have begun to blur and overlap and spill over into each other’s stories. She thinks it’s ironic, also slightly amusing, their bartering of misfortunes. It must be the war, yes, the war, and the stupid survivor’s remorse that keeps them intimate. It’s like a growing child, this guilt they carry around in their flesh, a shared child they’ve fed and tended and felt sprouting arms and legs and a little beating heart of its own. At night, she muses, if someone walked into their bedroom, it would be found sleeping between the two, holding their shirts in balled up fists, sated on a diet of well-internalised loss.

* * *

Late summer.

The house wilts in the heat. Detritus of hot days-the long-fingered leaves of poinsettias, now withered, brownish, clinging limply to a kitchen window. Alina feeds sparrows on the porch, burns dried leaves till her throat is raw with the taste of soot and leaves the hyacinths to fend for themselves.

Marvellous shapes are hidden in the clouds. If you care to look, you can see- a dragon, a heart, the silhouette of the Little Palace. A leaping cat, preying on flocks of geese that travel in shaky Vs across lilac skies.

Waiting for a miracle is a long, arduous process. This much she has learnt.

* * *

Plenty of work is yet to be done, and what with Kuzma out on the fields all day- it’s harvest season in Keramzin– she is left mostly to her own devices. That’s quite alright. Alina is grateful to exchange hours of squatting in wet mud and hissing back at the samovar for the placid, rolling greens and firewood-lemongrass smells of her new workplace. She cleans out rusty grates, and spends extra coin on baked goods from the military rest-house. On slow days, the teastall owner- old, kind eyed, half-Shu (like herself), a non participating enthusiast of the Small Science ( ~~like herself~~ )- is only too happy to regale her with tales of wizards and magic wars back from when Ravka wasn’t ruled by the Lantsov line and demons and mermaids bewitched the woods and crannogs with their strange, earth-bound spells. Alina knows these are the kind of stories her friends would turn their noses up against, but she is fascinated, drawn to them like wanderers in a sleeping city are drawn to music. Once she finally has a free run of the new place, she borrows a couple of books from him about primitive Grisha lore, and spends a week in the flower-scented, vine-tasselled front yard, reading up three fat volumes on the seeds of magic in early Ravkan history.

When the month is nearly over, and so are most of the preliminary repairs, Alina drags Zoya down to the moors one glorious sunset for a tour of the enchanted forests to the south of the district, where _vile_ and _rusalki_ had once prowled. The farmers speak of rain but for now it’s a clear, bright evening, full of possibilities. She leaves her friend half asleep by a small stream, the banks overgrown with sorrel, and ventures into the woods alone. 

_Alone is not lonely_. In this part of the country, green abounds. The trees are viridian shadows in dappled light. Everything smells like earth and bark and foliage. Fall is still weeks away, and then she knows the woods will shine in gold finery, ready to shed for the cold season. For the first time in months, she feels healed. Yes, that’s the word. _Healed_. It’s quiet in here, yet the air seems to be buzzing with unseen creatures. _Malenchki_ , Alina thinks and smiles. Weakness starts fading from her bones and soon enough she sees sacred knotted ribbons on some boughs, offerings placed in carefully arranged mounds by the mouths of some caves, implicitly knowing this is the place; this place has known some ancient spell in the past, perhaps still does.

After several minutes of skimming through twisted branches interlocking in webs and wandering in and out of the small caves, Alina finally finds what she is looking for, in the dead centre of the forest. Scattered around gnarled roots of a great beech tree are the wings of what were once brilliantly coloured _vile_ , fairies of the clouds and woods. Picking up one of them she turns it to the dying light, sees it flash blue and pink and silver. If what the books say is right, then these are some of the oldest persisting legacies of their kind. It’s marvellous, she thinks, how quickly and economically these creatures were slaughtered simply because Grisha couldn’t put a leash on their greed. “Sniffing for clues?”

Zoya has always been good at picking up on trails. “I found something; come sit beside me.”

“I think not. You’re channelling your inner Baba Yaga fantasies again, and I don’t wish to indulge that. Also, you really do have a taste for the morbid, Starkov.”

Alina puts a finger to her lips, beckons her to come closer. “It’s a _vila_ wing” she says. “There were old spirits in these forests once.”

“Yes, of course. That was before the age of kings and soldiers. Before the Second Army.”

“Before Grisha magic existed?”

“Saints know? Possibly.” Zoya scratches at the scales on the wing. “How do you know this is real _vila_?”

“I feel it in the air.”

“ _Eh_?”

“Don’t you feel it? I thought Grisha could pick it up quicker than....” Alina refuses to say _otkazat’sya,_ so she settles for, “... _other_ people.”

Unconvinced, Zoya looks back at the path they’ve taken to come to this clearing. “It’s getting dark. Why are we here again? Why couldn’t we go to Nadia’s and have plum puddings instead? Like sane, respectable folk?”

“We are not sane, respectable folk. We are Morozova’s degenerate whores.”

“Alina!”

“Not my words.” It’s growing cooler now, the skies a deep velvety blue-black, the exact shade as Zoya’s curls. Where the canopy parts, small clusters of stars glimmer. “Listen to the forest.”

“What’s there to listen?”

“Plenty.”

So they do. There’s a splendid full moon in the sky now, and everything it touches is washed in perfect, silver glitter, the trees and the stream and the caves. It overwhelms her, the moon, overwhelms her in the same manner as when she stands in sunlit courtyards on certain days, feeling her fingertips, her skin prickle with the unfinished promises of initiation.

Oh she had loved it. She cannot deny it anymore. She has hungered for it while it had lasted.

Something engulfs her, and slowly everything comes to life in a rush of smells and sounds and sights. Alina becomes keenly conscious of the splices in the brush, where deer has passed, the smell of rain beneath the earth, of the gradation in colour of every single wildflower that takes bloom here- primrose, bluebells, cowslip. Songbirds hiding somewhere in the branches of the beech. The very throb of old life. Everything is stronger, richer, leaves a deeper mark on the brain. She feels it all, and she knows Zoya does too, the rush of power that comes from using Grisha magic.

_Alina._

She’s so displaced, so lost in it all that she doesn’t realise Zoya is calling her.

“Alina! Look at this-oh, for _fuck’s_ sake.”

She lifts her head. Slowly, deliberately resurfaces to reality. And realizes what’s going on. Why Zoya is calling for her with such urgency.

Because she, Alina Starkov, is alight.

She is glowing.

Figuratively. Bizarrely. Light spills from her fingers, her lashes, her robes. Her hair is a sheet of silver beams. Her skin, translucent, sallow by morning, is embedded with illuminated, crystal-sharp rays. She is a creature of starlight.

Which she shouldn’t be.

Because _Sol Koroleva_ Alina was martyred two winters back.

She had seen her power escape her and enter the bodies of a new generation of sun summoners.

Yet here, in the heart of the primeval forest, well-rested under two Keramzin snows, it’s all hers, the night.

Awake, animated.

Stunning.

A large cloud passes over their heads. The light fizzles out.

She is back to who she was.

The spell is broken.

“We should...” Zoya collects her breath, tries again, “We should write to Nikolai.”

“What for?”

“Alina, you literally just summoned!”

“It’s happened before, during moments...” _why does she have to go and spoil it like that_? “When I’m high-strung, alright? It happens for a few minutes, then it passes. Like an aftershock.”

“You had stars in your hair.”

“I know.”

“We should inform him!”

“Why? What would Nikolai do?”

“You could come back! You could use your powers again! Live in Os Alta with Genya and the rest!”

“And why would I want that?”

Zoya pauses, taken aback.

“Was it ever about my powers, Zoya? Was it ever about being Sankta Alina?”

“I.... _saints_ , Alina. Are you happy here? We could work on your abilities, you know. David would help you. we have new Healers now, new drugs-”

“I don’t want it.”

“But-”

“Listen. I don’t want it.”

Zoya looks away. Her shoulders droop. “Very well.”

“Promise me you won’t tell him? Or anybody?”

“Is that the kind of person you think I am?” she snaps angrily. “It’s your secret. I don’t understand it, and I don’t agree to it, but curse me you haven’t been through some real horrible shit these past days. If you want to spend your life milking goats in this end-of-nowhere place, do it.”

She spits it out like an insult, yet it is the kindest thing anyone has told Alina in ages. It is better than Genya’s comforts and Tamar’s sagely advice and Mal’s protestations of undying love. Brutal. And honest.

“I’ve heard a _Vila_ shrivels and loses her power if you defile her hair.”

“How the hell do you defile hair?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Bitch.”

“You never did learn to be respectful to the holy ones.”

It’s not even very witty. But extraordinarily, Zoya giggles.

And a volcra flaps leathery wings in the pit of Alina’s stomach.

Howl.

Into the moon.

Nothing to do with the forest. Or maybe everything.

_Or maybe something about the firm curve of Zoya’s waist, the warm silky blackness of her hair. Her frosty eyes. Her dreadful gunfire laugh._

Soft.

That’s what the silence between them is. Soft and full of tree-bark scents.

“You’re right. We should leave.”

They rise and turn their backs to the detritus of old magic. Alina feels a bit like a proud little schoolboy, pockets full of illicitly gained sweets. She’s thinking of something clever to say, anything to make Zoya giggle again, when a sudden, piercing yowl rips the forest into two and sets a flock of bats scurrying out of a nearby burrow. It’s joined by two, then three....then dozens and dozens of the same baleful scream, from every corner of the Duke’s woods, shatter-glass and needle-pointed and almost painful on the ears.

_It’s them._

_They’re back._

Her head rings with it, and for a moment she feels hysterical- _skiff, sky, arm, wing, burst of light_ \- when she feels Zoya’s arm brush against her, and she instinctively clutches onto it, hard, too hard, knowing her nails are digging into Zoya’s wrist, knowing they’ll leave ugly red imprints for her morning bout of shame.

The unnerving cacophony begins and ends quickly enough to allow for silence to seep back immediately afterwards. She feels dizzy.

“It’s a pack of jackals from the hills. They are hunting hens. And sheep.” Zoya coughs, faux-politely. “ _Starkov_. Get it together.”

Alina doesn’t let go of her arm. “They sounded like-”

“The _vile_? Well that’s what comes from dabbling in shady occult business. Maybe if you’d taken piano lessons instead-”

“No,” Alina rasps. “Not the _vile_ , it was-”

“ _Rusalki_? Fear you not; assuredly, we’re the only sirens in the Keramzin woods tonight.”

Hammer to the head.

_Think about what you can have, fool._

_She is trying to distract me_ , Alina realises in wonderment. _She doesn’t want me to think about the volcra_. _And the war._

It’s just so bizarre. The calm unblinking pool of liquid lapis in Zoya’s eyes. The knowledge that she cares. The way that she lets Alina dig her nails into the softest part of her wrist without a whimper. “They’re just hunting chickens,” she says, and it’s so- it’s so goddamned _tender_ , Zoya Nazyalensky talking about poultry getting slaughtered, it’s so dazzlingly beautiful _,_ that it messes up Alina’s brain, the last reasonable inch of it, and she tumbles down cackling like a hyena.

Because.

It’s terribly _funny_.

Almost as if it’s easy.

Almost.

Zoya smiles, albeit unsurely. “Quick recovery there.”

“No, no, you’ve got it wrong,” Alina wipes her eyes. “Don’t you _see_? We’ve stepped back in time. _We_ are the _vile,_ _we_ are the _rusalki_. You have cut my hair and now I’m ugly and shall feed on bloody chickens. That’s a fucking twist; you didn’t see _that_ coming, eh, Nazyalensky?”

“Alina, Alina. You sound like a raving lunatic.”

“I’m drunk on moonshine. It’s a clever visual metaphor, see?”

More bewildered than anything else, Zoya starts laughing. “You’ve gone senile!” she trills merrily. “First you hair went white and now you’ve lost your wits!”

They break into hysterics again.

And Alina notices several things in fast sweet crisp coloured detail.

Zoya tumbling backwards, giddy with delight, soft palm pressed against her mouth like a drunken idiot, petite, elfin, the calmness in her eyes now dancing in navy ripples.

Thinking, wildly, bravely, _here, now_.

A blinding white-hot surge of light scalding her own belly, her ribs and skin and neck and face and the tips of her stupid hair.

Set aflame.

_What a way to go._

Because she can’t anymore.

She _won’t_ -

And-

Her forefinger and thumb pulling at a long stray curl on Zoya’s shoulder. Her free hand sliding round Zoya’s waist. Her heart hammering so loudly it makes her knees unsteady.

It’s an accident.

Somehow.

Her lips against Zoya’s.

A sudden, contagious shudder. Zoya freezing, where she touches her. Skin tensing under palms.

_Think about the easy things. The pretty things._

All she can think, is-

_This. This._

She kisses her again. For a moment, mouth lingering.

Again.

And waits.

Zoya’s shirt, bunched into her fingers, melting out from the spaces between. Nothing.

Nothing.

_Want me back, goddamn it._

Nothing.

_Count for thunder_. Ana’s words. Slow, steady. The longer, the further.

One.

Two.

It’s charring her on a spit.

Three.

Zoya kisses her back.

First, almost cautiously.

A beat. A hair’s breadth between their mouths. An apex.

Then she stakes her demands.

Nails gashing against her jawbone. Tugging at her hair. Upwards. _Look over here._

_Now._

She is burnt alive. It’s everywhere, the light. Everywhere.

A crack of blue fire from Zoya’s mouth to hers. In her blood. Crashing down her spine. Wave and wave and wave. She grips her waist. She exists where she’s touched. The rest of her is mist.

Zoya pulls her in, sharply, and this time they come at it together. She hooks her arms round Zoya’s neck, to keep from sinking to her knees. They kiss again, and a sudden, horrific, embarrassing noise escapes her mouth. _A plea_. In response, Zoya tightens her grip, closing her arms in. Lips part. Tongues. Teeth.

She feels it again, the blue flames, and they lick against her vertebrae, blood pooling into her legs.

Alina shimmers.

She presses her closed eyelids against Zoya’s cheeks, stopping to catch her breath. In her mind, she sees a long, eternal summer.

Sugar-spun clouds and soft tree shadows and Zoya’s mouth against the edge of her jaw.

Too far to respond, too near to crumple.

None of them speak. She tugs at the lock of hair wrapped round her thumb, presses kisses to the side of her face, her dimples, her mouth. Sees in her head, Zoya and the forest and the night, a blur of colours. Two winters’ worth of nightmares. A lot to trade.

The jackals start screeching again.

“You have jinxed it, Starkov,” Zoya jibes softly into Alina’s mouth. “They’ll keep at it all night now. A whole massacre.”

“Too bad,” she replies, tracing the thin scar nearest to Zoya’s dimple. “I’m only a saint of light, not livestock.”

“Your sense of humour is getting worse.”

“This is to compensate,” Alina laughs, kissing her again.

The farmers were right. It does rain. But that's for later.

* * *

Later:

_The Keramzin Cathedral isn’t a piece of work like some of its fancier counterparts in Adena and Os Alta. But like all holy sites, it’s solemn and vaguely menacing in the rainy dark. Candles at every window. Disembodied singing in inner sanctums. Too much incense in the air. Over-powering, over-perfumed._

_They find their footing together, smothering cackles at poorly made jokes, braving through wet cold churchyard paths, harsh beds of monastic stones and_ _gooseberry thickets with brambles sharp and glossy enough to tear the skin to the bone._

_Behind the shrine proper, behind the cells and gardens and groves, there is a nook. A part of the cathedral, but not quite._

_Eaves. Stone angels, purple irises growing on their wings. Latticed and decrepit._

_Safe shelter, on nights like these._

_Hard and cold stone._

_Irrelevant._

_Relevant-_

_Zoya’s hair, soft, tangled, rain beading every petulant comma and swirl. Matted against her forehead. Cold prickles where it touches Alina’s bare skin, pooling round her shoulders. A simple act of sharing._

_Droplets sliding down her right cheekbone. The brown lines of her neck. Showing Alina where to go._

_A map of sorts._

_She’s always known. Somewhere. It’s always been there. Nestled inside of her. This hunger._

_The knife twists in her belly._

_Fingers in hair. The shadow of lashes on cheeks. Zoya’s knee, pressing at the warm junction of her legs. Brush of silk on rough skin._

_She wants the sun but she wants the storm too. Dies in her need for it. She thinks she might fall._

_She thinks she might fall, but Zoya holds her._

_Arm to arm; hand in hair, the promise of something at the edge of her lips. She’s not sure where to go from here, so she clings to Zoya’s waist, traces her spine, the scars beneath her dress. It’s laved to her body like blue paint- the fabric smooth, diaphanous, her skin alive underneath. Ridges and dips and arches of it, warm against the cold flat of Alina’s palms. Fingertips. Brushing the jut of the hip, then inwards, and out again._

_Zoya starts, her breathing audible, even for the rain. Storm witch muffled by a spun sugar cloud._

_Her skin pulses. The scars shine like jewelled seams against her belly, her neck, her legs._

_A fraction of a second. A thread._

_And then she finds Alina’s hand, insistent, impatient and pulls her down where she wants her to be, over her blue paint dress, her breasts- and then down, down, wherever._

_The summer in her blood. Singing and singing and singing._

_Alina has to stop. She ought to._

_Test for fallacies. For a crack in the glass._

_She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t._

_She cannot. There are things Saints cannot do. ~~And she is only a mummer’s saint at that.~~_

_Brown. Dark blue. Silently, they agree. Yes._

_Better than yes, even. So much._

_The tactility of it all. Rain and incense and Zoya’s wildflowery hair. Coarse spiny granite floor digging into their skin. Bells and chants and psalms and her own broken shallow breaths as Alina moves, surrounded by Zoya, inside of Zoya. Marvelling at how her hips arch, at how she is unable to kiss Alina back, her mouth barely functioning._

_And then she laughs._

_She laughs, her shoulders shaking, pressing her lips together tightly to stifle chuckles even as she is, lying on the stone floor, heavy-lidded, tremors passing from her down into Alina’s hand._

_What?_

_They’re singing about you, in the cathedral. Listen._

_She does. They are. It doesn’t matter._

_Incredibly profane of you. Sankta Alina, they’re praying._

_So am I._

_Zoya throws back her head at that, in hysterics- youaremadyouaremadyouaremad- and Alina follows the pulsating golden-brown hollow of her general’s throat with her tongue. Alight, weightless, unfettered- until laughter gives way to heavy, gasping breaths, until Zoya’s muscles shake, until her own skin prickles and burns at the friction. Until they break and burn and melt and drown and drown and drown together._

* * *

And after:

Slicing up tomatoes for a broth, Alina has a realisation. Not particularly broth-related.

Zoya Nazyalensky is an aggressively beautiful woman with a splintered ice stare and a tongue barbed enough to scrape the skins of blood oranges and petulant saints right off them, but she is also, in more ways than one, a bit of an idiot. Which would explain why she slings one arm each around Tamar and Nadia barely two hours into the evening and insists they get “juiced” till they collapse. The Shu Grisha doesn’t need to be asked twice. Nadia refuses.

“Oh Sankt Feliks. A bore even off-duty.”

“That you know of,” Tamar whispers conspiratorially. Nadia dons an expression that Genya used to call a _lemon-juice smile_.

“Glut all you like, don’t bring me into it. And _you_ ,”-here turning to face her wife with sabre-toothed hostility-“you better watch yourself. The last time the pair of you went drinking, you broke a man’s skull.”

“He asked me to _snake dance_ for him!” Zoya calls out in protest, tugging the Heartrender towards the door. “Asked if I would be a _good girl_ , take his money and read his fucking thoughts.”

“Hence the cracked skull. Facilitates the process. Besides we threw a coin at his way, so he could be stitched up right after. Zoya, you’re twisting my arm, love.”

“I don’t care for you calling her _love-_ ” Nadia grins despite herself as her wife breaks her off in a conciliatory kiss (partially interrupted by a Stop Being Disgusting You Two). The duo leave, Zoya laughing at some nonsense Tamar spouts about feral frustrated Ravkan men in village fairs, although, Alina is quick to notice, her laugh doesn’t have the sonorous gunfire ring to it.

Just something to gloat about.

Later, when she puts a wine-flushed Zoya to bed, the latter insists on rising from several layers of fleecy quilts to grip the edges of her not-so-choir-boy hair and drunkenly kiss her senseless while Alina practically implodes, her blood threatening to churn like butter as Zoya’s hand brushes her lower lip before falling back, slack, upon the sheets.

Once her breathing evens, she stands outside in the narrow hallway, narrower now, stuffed like straw down her lungs. Detritus of the cataclysm: little sharp stones falling out of their sarafans when she washes them. Red half-moons, two on her shoulder, one on the inward flex of her thigh. They haven’t gotten around to discussing it. Maybe she should have stuck to bouncing off light like some royalty-sponsored, evil-vanquishing sentient prism. Easier to make sense of.

Downstairs, she keeps drifting away. Over berries and cream, Nadia merrily talks about Adrik, how Tolya pampers Misha and Oncat, showing up with extravagant presents to the boy’s new home, a fleeting mention of a possible trip next summer to Sikursk.

“We’re not too sure, what with the border tensions. But the foothills are lovely in spring.”

Alina nods, clucking her tongue at the sudden sour twang of an unripe berry. She catches Tamar looking curiously at her, as of some newfangled discovery. _Oh, fuck it._

“It’s good to see you happy, sister,” she tells her as they rinse out their plates. “Maybe you were right.”

“About being unwanted at Os Alta?”

“Nikolai would sell a hand and foot to get you back. And Zoya too.”

She concentrates on rubbing a greasy speck with her thumb.

“He hasn’t written.”

“Yet.”

“I made myself clear.”

“Maybe she didn’t.”

“Tamar, they called her a whore in open court.”

Tamar _tsks_ slightly, nods her head in resentment. “You think they hold an office still? Nikolai had them blacklisted and thrown out by their bloody scruffs that very day. Hell I would. With or without a permit.”

“Ah. I see. Great.” Grease under her nail. She rubs along the edge with her thumb, annoyance bubbling in her gut.

“Then why does she stay on?”

“What?”

“Everybody wants her back. Nikolai. Genya. Tolya and I. All the ones who had mattered to her. Once. Why does she stay on? Here, in Keramzin of all places? Why wouldn’t she leave?”

Alina almost feels like the one time in military camp when Mikhael had playfully thwacked her in the stomach with a rifle-butt. “I don’t know.”

“Ask her then,” Tamar retorts coolly. “Or are you both on a strictly non-verbal contract? I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t judge. I knew a Durast once who felt non-cooperative silence made things spicier during tumbles.”

“Shut up.”

“Who would’ve thought? That one day at training. She broke your heart. And your fifth rib.”

It’s infuriating to be so transparent, but it’s also such a relief to not be hiding any longer. She chases out Tamar with a dirty ladle, but as her friend runs up the stairs screaming bloody murder, Alina feels the last shadow by the grate flicker and fizzle out, even as she ignites.

* * *

It was something they’d discussed on their last night together. They were all lying on one bed, like they had in the final days of the war. Just before the skies lightened at the break of dawn, Zoya mumbled, grumpily, “I wish I could sleep without nightmares. Like I did before I became Grisha.”

“You don’t become Grisha,” Tamar had mumbled back from an indistinct point on Nadia’s belly. “You are born with it.”

“Yes, yes. You know what I mean.”

“I wish I could be happy at the silliest things,” Nadia had said wistfully. “Like a new flower in the garden.”

And Alina, an arm around Zoya, couldn’t help but add, “I wish I could draw again. I was painting all the time at the orphanage.”

In the heart of her new school, armed with a lifetime’s supply of coloured chalk, oil paints and hog-bristle brushes, she feels like doing something rash.

So she goes overboard. Flowers on the cabinets. Funny little monsters from the edges of blackboards, maps every which way, maps that join and part randomly, tips of peninsulas and clusters of islands on every wall.

“So much creativity, so little talent,” Zoya says.

“Me about you.”

Dusk- that delicious time when the sky’s coloured like thickened wine and winter bleeds into the gaps between the floorboards. Alina sketches a white dragon around the banisters. Evening stars braid through its crest. Zoya crouches at the doorway of one of the bedrooms, playing with a glass wind chime. “Everything will be ready and pretty when the children are here,” she says. “Did you see the new porcelain? Genya sent a gilded set. You’ll have the most spoilt brats in all of Ravka to mother over.”

“What are your plans, Zoya?”

“I’ll hide in the cabinet during school hours.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

She had written it out actually. But since the war, she’s also come to depend on improvisations like air. Zoya walks up behind her and places her chin on her shoulder; Alina breaks the chalk on the dragon’s right eye and swears. The weight on her shoulder lifts, Zoya smirks, _pathetic_ , and goes back to her place by the doorway. “What were you saying?”

“Tamar said Nikolai wanted you back.”

“Did he.” A flat, hostile pause. “Look, the dragon’s squinty-eyed.”

“You don’t want to go back?”

“I like Keramzin.” Zoya sulkily traces patterns in the dust with one toe.

“You don’t have to humour me, Zoya. I know you are needed. And you would marry your job if you could,” Alina gives a little laugh. “What happened to the nightmares? And the bad tea? And leaking roof? What happened to being, I quote, _a magnificent queen_?”

“Fuck that. I have toughened my guts for bad tea. Leaking roofs are romantic. And Os Alta gave me the nightmares to begin with. Anyway I like being around you. You are such a wreck. Makes me feel better about myself.”

“Said she who cannot peel an eggshell.”

“I _have_ peeled eggs before and I am _not_ -” here comes the balalaika, but Alina is prepared this time, and she rises to meet it, putting down the chalk and kissing Zoya right out of her litany, tasting oranges and the dark cranberry gloss of her mouth.

“Is that your defence mechanism, kissing me every time you say or do something stupid?”

“It’s one of them.”

The house shifts in tone and balance, her dragon left unfinished like a forgotten half-delivered joke. Zoya grabs her hand and pulls her through the doorway; she can practically taste the summer in her throat. It’s all a novelty, Alina thinks; they can talk about king and country later, and really, after all this, would it even matter.

There is so much of her life she has had to bury. She thinks of ash trees and regiments and the steady morning drill of past regrets. It’s like standing in an ocean, feeling the tide overwhelm her. But then the wave recedes. It always recedes.

When winter comes, they warm their hands over a charcoal fire. Zoya reaches over to flick up Alina’s collar. She rests her head against the Grisha’s shoulder and is immediately told off for being a soppy mess. It doesn’t matter. Snow reaches their windows.

In spring, Alina learns to savour things- silk, skin, skin, silk- and eventually, Zoya stops complaining about nightmares.

* * *

Summer.

Lily-leaf skin. Liquid splashes of sunrise.

Alina stashes away their woollens and keftas into the chest, and brings out light, bright cotton dresses, which fall to place in white and yellow waves like daisy chains on Zoya’s sunburnt knees. Long walks along the Sokol in the early morning, when the fog hasn’t lifted, and it’s still beautiful by the water. Another basket of fruit, straight from the orchard, cooling off in beds of ice. Sometimes, late night swims in the streams, in salty star-filled water. Sleeping on the roof.

Zoya persuades (threats) Kuzma into helping them put the finishing touches to the school. He paints the main classrooms bright yellow, cuts spangled suns and stars for the ceiling. Building them a small shrine for the children to pray in.

“Say, Ruby, you ever notice how you and this icon here of Sankta Alina look a little alike?”

“Yes, I am a devotee.”

From another room: “She’s a counterfeit. She plays dress-up at pantomimes.”

“Where’d you get all this money from?” he huffs once when Alina shows up with a box of new, finely crafted dolls from Balakirev.

“We have rich friends,” Zoya answers lazily.

* * *

They concur, jointly that sometime soon, Zoya should return to Os Alta. Ravka is a painting in glass, suspended on twine; the country needs every soldier it can afford. “I’m the best they have,” she announces over coffee. “Although I don’t know if I’ll be in any shape to take on some Fjerdans when I get back. Two-thirds of commander Nazyalensky is just greasy food.”

“And the remaining third is a dimwit who cannot tell thyme from rosemary,” Alina says tenderly.

“We never learnt about spices and condiments at the capital.”

“Your loss,” -and she kisses the tip of Zoya’s nose.

But the future is blurred by the present, and the present is a dormant village by the border, the present is another lapse in the reservoir and eating breakfast under umbrellas in the kitchen and collapsing against each other against the hallway wall, an indecipherable conglomerate of limbs and half opened clothes and jokes shared practically telepathically- one laughs before the other can speak, and Zoya can tell in exactitude the barest details of what Alina does to her in their shared dreams.

“You were prettier.”

“You were smarter.”

“If I was any smarter, I’d be Nikolai.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Alina says warningly. “You threw a fit that one time I bested you.”

“Beginner’s luck.” Zoya shoves her palm against Alina’s face, and curls a leg round the small of her waist. “I would’ve decimated you.”

“Debatable.”

Zoya manoeuvres her right onto the unnecessarily large stack of pillows. “I _would_ ,” she promises, and there is a thrill of sweetness in her voice, maybe danger, or maybe both, because as Alina has learnt, one doesn’t get to dissect Zoya and keep the honey at the cost of the poison. For herself, she is perfectly fine, giddily too, especially when she lowers her head to the apex of Zoya’s thighs and is rewarded with a slap to the back of the head and a yelp.

It’s what love should be, but for now Alina prefers to leave it unnamed. Too many things lose themselves to broken bombastic epithets. Besides she isn’t sure if it is enough. If the whole business of sharing food and touch and secrets and pain, of Zoya spitting orange seeds at her crown and mixing up the herring and chicken pies, of herself caressing the silver lines on a golden back, pressing flowers into their clasped hands and grinning and grinning and grinning through their kisses should be a synonym for _love_. Alina has loved before, but it’s nothing like this.

“Tell me, Alina Starkov,” Zoya speaks into her temple.

“Ark Oval Saint.”

“You thought of that one before.”

“I didn’t.”

“Liar. Ovarian stalk.”

“You win this time,” Alina tells her. She blows out the lamp before Zoya gets a chance to kiss her, and then reaches for her in the dark anyway.

* * *

The school opens. Kuzma hides in the cattle pen, as muddy, scruffy village troublemakers run through the carefully decorated establishment like excitable moths in a hall of candles. Bringing in with them: mud, branches laden with hard blood-red berries, the smell of the outdoors, the simple amity of children.

Alina lets them.

And when Zoya winks at her as they pass each other in the hallway sometimes, or curls her fingers rather daringly round a tassel of her dress, she lets her too.

They’ll make do. That’s what she tells Nikolai when he visits her before the solstice, _we’ll make do_. She tells him he has done enough. The money and the emerald. Steering the country.

She doesn’t tell him how on some dawns, it feels like she and Zoya are all that ever existed of the world. Them and the room and the blank space where Ravka had once stood, now vanishing in puffs of balmy air as she plays with the rays that shine off Zoya’s lashes. Doesn’t tell him how their sentences come together, how she loves to see her white hair mix with the dark clouds of Zoya’s curls, how she has unconsciously imbibed every single detail of their lives, textures and scents and coughs and smiles, and won’t trade them for the light of twenty suns.

Everywhere around them, things come apart. Too much decay, too much ruination for even her prodigious fingers to coax back into the deep earth.

But she is willing to try.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was originally a harry potter drabble set in 80s london, written for my best friend. needless to say, some things have changed. it's my first grishaverse work ever and probably my longest oneshot yet. i braved no less than five breakdowns, two net blackouts, three team walkouts and one semester to punch this out. and it's still bad. oh well. also papa hozier if you're reading this i did everything, i made the lesbians kiss in a forest and make out in a church, please adopt me into your faerie realm :'(  
> 1 kudos = 1 smooch from miss zoya, 1 comment = 1 star snatching weave, 1 ignore = 1 unsolicited dick pic from darkles


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